I often wonder if I'm a perpetrator of the things that I hate most about our society today.

For instance, if I'm sitting in a restaurant where others are eating, do I talk on my cell phone? Yes, sometimes I do. However, I don't have the feature that allows my phone to become a walkie-talkie. I wonder if the people that have those phones realize that the only excusable reason you should be on a walkie-talkie in a restaurant is if you're a public safety officer of some sort. If not, you should probably turn the phone off, call the person using the old-school cellular phone feature, or go outside. I still don't want to hear your walkie-talkie conversation. I'll avoid talking about people that talk on the phone check-out lines. You people are so rude that stores had to make signs to let you know that you're rude.

So...I'm what you might call a passive-aggressive driver. OK, I'm actually just an aggressive driver. I'm not one of those people that goes through and passes every single car I possibly can just to get to the next light (gotta love the traffic planning in Charlottesville). I just like to get where I'm going in a timely fashion and I wish that others were as comfortable and proficient at driving their vehicles to feel the same.

Lately I've noticed what must be a complete paradigm shift in traffic engineering. Red lights have come to mean "caution" and yellow lights mean "you should use caution soon...but not just yet...when you're ready to stop...it's red...but you've got some time...oh just run it." What's my point? Only a certain percentage of us have gotten wind of this shift. Some of us still don't believe it to be true. In fact, I'm fairly certain that if I were to try this out for myself, I'd find a blue light special waiting for me at the other side of the intersection. Even worse, someone that is annoyed as I am by this type of activity could just pull off and T-bone me - and it would be my fault.

Even if I don't like when lights turn red, and they always turn red when I get to them, they do serve a purpose (much like a language). Imagine if pilots just stopped listening to air traffic controllers.

2
comments:

I'm definitely not an aggressive driver, but I certainly get annoyed by outright dumb "drivers."

For instance, just yesterday I was getting onto 29/250 from Fontaine Research Park. There were a number of cars entering with me. As I'm trying to merge into traffic, I notice an SUV (the small Rav-4 kind, not the ginormous kind) in the right lane slowly gaining on me. The problem is that they're gaining on me enough that they'll be right next to me as I try to merge.

With cars in front of me, I can't exactly speed up. With cars behind me, I'd rather not slow down enough to let this SUV pass as I'll just end up screwing the cars behind me who'll have to merge at a much lower speed.

I'm the kind of guy that looks at my merge WAY ahead of time, so I have plenty of time to watch this all go down and plenty of time to figure out my options. And, just as I fully expected, right as I get to the point where I can start to merge, this SUV is right next to me. And they stay there. And they stay there. And then FINALLY she moves over to the left-hand lane and let's me merge.

Normally, I would have just considered this "one of those things" where traffic patterns collude to screw you as you try to merge. But, as I looked far ahead and far behind in the left lane, there were NO vehicles to be seen. NONE!

So, basically, this person was just THAT dumb that they only decided to move over into a COMPLETELY OPEN lane when they ABSOLUTELY had to.